alt Hacker NewsCan you give an example to help us understand?
I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.
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Then why isn't it? Just offload it to the clankers and go enjoy a margarita at the beach or something.
Why do you have a backlog then? If a current AI can do 100% of it then just run it over the weekend and close everything
I think the "well defined prompt" is precisely what the person you responded to is alluring to. They are saying they don't get worried because AI doesn't get the job done without someone behind it that knows exactly what to prompt.
>>I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI.
That's a sign that you have spurious problems under those tickets or you have a PM problem.
Also, a job is a not a task- if your company has jobs which is a single task then those jobs would definitely be gone.
Here's an example ticket that I'll probably work on next week:
The body doesn't give much other than the high-level motivation from the person who filed the ticket. In order to implement this, you need to have a lot of context, some of which can be discovered by grepping through the code base and some of which can't:- What is the validation system and how does it work today?
- What sort of UX do we want? What are the specific deficiencies in the current UX that we're trying to fix?
- What prior art exists on the backend and frontend, and how much of that can/should be reused?
- Are there any scaling or load considerations that need to be accounted for?
I'll probably implement this as 2-3 PRs in a chain touching different parts of the codebase. GPT via Codex will write 80% of the code, and I'll cover the last 20% of polish. Throughout the process I'll prompt it in the right direction when it runs up against questions it can't answer, and check its assumptions about the right way to push this out. I'll make sure that the tests cover what we need them to and that the resultant UX feels good. I'll own the responsibility for covering load considerations and be on the line if anything falls over.
Does it look like software engineering from 3 years ago? Absolutely not. But it's software engineering all the same even if I'm not writing most of the code anymore.